About a week before he disappeared, Bobby went home for a weekend. When Langness was washing her son’s clothes she noticed blood stains on his underwear. She would later wonder whether he may have been molested and that is what he wanted to speak with her about.

On the day he disappeared, Langness didn’t get a call back from Cheyenne Mountain until the late afternoon and was told that her son ran away from the facility.

One staff member spotted him off grounds and said he didn’t try to stop Bobby because the boy was too big. He weighed 180 pounds. In a police report, the man would say, “Maybe (Bobby) didn’t make it. Maybe he is dead.”

Three days after her son disappeared, Cheyenne Mountain staff warned Langness to stop calling them asking about his runaway son because he was no longer their responsibility. If she didn’t stop they would file a harassment charge against her.

She received his clothes. Oddly, she got both pairs of his shoes. That didn’t make any sense because he had sensitive feet.

“He didn’t go anywhere without his shoes,” Langness, who now lives in Kansas with her third husband.

For nearly a year, Langness loaded Gerald Jr. in the car and they went searching downtown Colorado Springs and places where runaways congregated.

But as time passed, she worried that something had happened to her son.

“There has been absolute silence,” said Langness, adding that she has not heard from her son in 24 years. “I don’t understand the dead silence. It’s not him. I know him. If he ran away he would have called. There is no way he would run away without any shoes.”

In 2004, Langness spoke with an FBI agent at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about her son’s case. The agent recommended that she speak with homicide detectives about her son’s disappearance.

Langness has created the Missing Robert Pillsen-Rahier Facebook page so that people can leave tips about her son.

Anyone with information that could help solve this case is asked to call the Colorado Springs Police Department at 719-444-7000.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.